Three Scratched Out Words
by fowl68
Summary: They fit with each other, in that strange, ragtag way that teenagers do. "She survived, and she'll be stronger for it."


**Disclaimer:** Don't own anything.

**Author's Note:** Got this idea smack in the middle of writing the next chapter for Photographs of Freedom—that seems to be happening a lot lately—and I had to write it before it went away. Got the inspiration when I heard the song I Loved Her First by Heartland.

_-/-/-/-_

_Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express. ~Joseph Addison_

-/-/-/-

When you first meet your daughter's team, you know that something in her has pulled away from you. She's smiling that unsure-but-game smile that she's had ever since she was taking her first steps and trying to steal a cookie.

The sensei is a bright man, smiling politely while he exchanged a firm handshake with you. You eye this man, see the power veiled by the bright exterior. There are shadows in the blue eyes, secrets and blood spilled and you have no doubts that this man can keep your girl safe.

One of her teammates is an Uchiha boy. He grins wide and when he shakes your hand, it isn't with the firm assurance of a man, but with the slight hesitation, the slight nervousness of someone who wasn't used to shaking hands with people. He looks like an Uchiha; dark spiky hair, eyes black as the devil's heart, but he doesn't act like one. There is none of that aloofness, the arrogance.

Not that there isn't arrogance and pride in him—he's a boy, after all—but it's the normal pride, the normal arrogance of a teenager who thinks that they can take on the world and win.

The third team member is the one that spells Trouble. You aren't a shinobi, you don't run in those circles, but even you had heard of Sakumo's disgrace, of his suicide. This boy has the look of him. Dark grey eyes, silver hair that looked like it had never known a brush. There's a mask covering the lower half of his face, but the resemblance is still clear. He's skinny and wiry and there are the same shadows in his eyes as in the sensei's.

But Rin fits with them somehow. Rin, with her gentle nature, with her kindness, fit with people like these. Your first instinct is to say no, to get her away from this because you've got that bad gut feeling and your father always told you to trust your gut.

But Rin's smile is still in place, still tinged with that uncertainty. She wants you to like them, to approve and you see it clearly. She might not know it yet, but she's already falling in love with them. All three of them.

And a part of your heart screams that she can't be because she's _your_ daughter, that she was yours first.

But you want to be supportive, so you hook a smile on your face and say, "Nice to meet you." 

-/-/-/-

Rin is home for dinner less and less. After the first full week of not seeing her across from you at dinner like you had for almost eleven years, you ask her about it.

She smiles sheepishly. "Sorry, Dad. When we finish training, it's almost sunset, so sensei takes us out for ramen. It's his favorite and he always takes us to this great little place called Ichiraku."

You can understand that, though you don't want to. You don't want to see her come home, sweat still on her forehead, hair tangled and still smiling tiredly, but proudly. "Think you can at least have dinner with your old dad on the weekends?"

Rin laughs. "Of course!"

-/-/-/-

Rin is shifting uncomfortably in front of you. "…I need to borrow some money, Dad."

"What for?"

She isn't looking you in the eye. "Just…stuff."

"What stuff?" It's strange. You've always told each other everything. It was one of the rules of the house. She mumbled something. "Sweetheart, you've gotta speak up."

"…I need a bra." She said a little louder, hiding behind her hair.

Your mind short-circuits for a minute. "Oh."

Suddenly, the only question in your mind is where had your little girl gone? Suddenly, you don't quite recognize the young woman in front of you. There are curves on your daughter now that you hadn't noticed before. They were gentle ones, hardly there, but it was proof that Rin wasn't going to stay the freckle-faced girl that you remembered.

"…Sure." You dig in your pockets for money, handing her some. "Do you…ah…need some help?"

She glances up at you and shakes her head. "I'm good, Dad. I'll see you for dinner, yeah?"

"Yeah." You echo.

-/-/-/-

She comes home with a black eye one day and you nearly explode. "What happened?"

Rin looks up at you. "Nothing, Dad."

"That eye isn't nothing."

"I fell."

You'd been a teenager once, had gotten into a few fights. It had been a good decade or so, but you remember the code. No ratting out. Not to anyone. "Who'd you fall on?"

"This guy."

"Who's the guy?"

"No one you know."

"Why'd you fall on him?"

Her brown eyes flare with temper and she reminds you very much of your wife at that moment. She'd had a temper too. "He said that girls shouldn't be shinobi. That we should just go back home to the kitchen where we belong."

You feel anger stirring as well. "So…did you win?"

Rin looks a bit surprised by that question, but then she grins. "Yeah, Dad. I did."

You give her a one-armed hug and lead her to the kitchen. "How are things with your team?" You ask as you get an icepack out of the freezer.

"They're good. Obito and Kakashi argue all the time, but," She shrugs, wincing slightly as she does it.

You gently press the icepack against her eye. "They're boys. They tend to do that."

She chuckles. "Yeah. That's what sensei told me."

"Has he been teaching you a lot?"

"Oh yeah."

"Like what?"

Now she hesitates, tensing a little. "I can't tell you."

You eye her. Her skin is browner from so much time outside, the baby fat gone. "Is it a shinobi thing?"

"Yeah."

You hum in understanding. "Then tell me more about your teammates. What are they like?"

She lights up when she talks about them. Obito is a prankster, a bit of a slacker, but they share lunches a lot. He doesn't like tomatoes or asparagus. Kakashi doesn't talk much, except for when he argues with Obito. She'd offered to share lunch with him too, more than once, but he always refused. Sensei said that he was as stubborn as a mule and gave her full permission to kick him in the head if she got annoyed with him.

-/-/-/-

She studies hard, your daughter. You've become accustomed to coming into the kitchen in the morning and seeing her in the living room, lamp on, blanket over her legs and several thick books in her lap with a notepad right beside it.

"What're you studying this time?" You ask as you begin brewing coffee.

"Medicine." She replies absently, turning a page.

You turn back to her. "You're going to be a doctor?"

"I wanna be a field medic." When she looks over the back of the couch at you, you see that something's changed in her eyes. She looks more like that Kakashi and her sensei now.

You swallow hard because you don't want to imagine what horrors she's seen. "Really?"

She knows you too well. "You don't like the idea."

"I'm worried about you."

She sets the books aside and stands, coming into the kitchen to lean against the counter. She looks more like her mother these days than ever. She'd cut her dark red hair short—it was becoming annoying, she said—and she'd grown a few inches. In the last few months, her curves are becoming a little more noticeable or perhaps you're simply more aware of them_ (You've already vowed that you'll kill any boy that gets too close to her)_. Her pajama pants have two bears in jeans kissing, printed all over them and the T-shirt is an old one with a hole in the left shoulder.

"I know you are, Dad. But…I can handle this. Really."

You know that. Rin's always been a strong girl. But the part that hurts the most is that she can handle it without you, without any support from you at all.

But you can't say that to her, aren't sure you know the words to say to her, so you only nod and slide a mug of coffee across the counter to her.

-/-/-/-

Her sensei invites you to dinner with them one night. A proper dinner, he said, no ramen. So you join them at the restaurant and there's a lovely woman standing beside the sensei with bright red hair falling in a waterfall down her back and dark blue eyes. Trouble with a capital T was standing beside them, mask still in place and looking a bit ganglier than he had before. Obito and Rin are looking at the menu on the window and pointing at different items, laughing at some secret joke.

When Rin turns, she grins real wide. "Dad!" She runs to hug you and you're not quite sure why she's so happy to see you.

The red-haired woman's name is Kushina, the sensei's girlfriend. She's hot-tempered and quick-witted and her and Rin have formed a strange alliance, one that the sensei and the boys are wary of. They're pleasant dinner company and Obito sits on the other side of Rin and they share food without thinking. His tomatoes are moved to her plate while her shrimp is moved to his.

"What's the cause for celebration?" You ask the sensei, Minato.

Minato looks at you strangely, as do the others. "Do we need something to celebrate?"

You shrug. "This seems more like a celebration to me."

Minato looks at Rin. "Then we're celebrating your birthday early."

Rin laughs. "By a month and a half, sensei?"

Minato gives her a stern frown, but it's severity is lost by the laughter in his blue eyes. "Don't question your sensei."

Obito and Rin snicker. "Yessir." They say teasingly.

By the time dessert rolls around, Rin looks at you. "Wanna split a brownie?"

"Sure, honey."

The brownie is delicious even if you both scrape off the vanilla ice cream, giving it to Kakashi, which surprises you because he doesn't seem like the type to enjoy sweets. And you haven't seen his face all evening. Every time you look, there's less food on his plate. It's strange, but the others don't seem concerned about it.

Minato steals the cherry from Obito's milkshake and Kushina breaks off a piece of her boyfriend's cookie and you're surprised to feel like you're at home.

-/-/-/-

You come home one day and she's glowing and spinning in a circle, arms out and looking down at herself. "What's happened?"

She grins proudly at you. "I made it to chuunin."

You stare at her, really take in the vest on her shoulders that's just a little too big and it's olive green and you think that green has never been really been her color because she'd been pink once. She'd been pink and dresses and freckles once and she used to call him Daddy.

The grin fades and she's looking at you worriedly. "Dad? Are you okay?"

You blink out of your thoughts and force a smile on your face. "'Course I am." You don't tell her that you would've liked to be told that she was taking the exams, that you wanted to see her in action because everyone was allowed into the third part of the exams. "We should celebrate. How's pizza sound?"

She grins at you and goes to order the pizza. You pay, as is the ritual. It's half ham and pineapple and half meat lovers and she steals the sausage pieces that fall from your slices and you'll snatch a pineapple from hers. It's familiar and comforting because maybe your little girl isn't gone after all.

-/-/-/-

They walk her home one night. Well, it's not the first time, but it's one that you remember vividly, though there hadn't been anything particularly strange about this time.

It was raining that night and they're later than usual in coming home. The umbrella that Rin had bought Obito for his thirteenth birthday bobs through the street and three people are crowded beneath it. They walk her to the door and the Uchiha waves goodbye to her as she starts climbing the stairs up to the apartment.

They fit with each other, you think, in that strange, ragtag way that teenagers do. They argue and laugh and simply sit and breathe in each other's presence sometimes—you've seen them—and you're starting to think that Trouble isn't nearly what you thought he was. Oh, he wasn't good news. Rin _liked_ him, you could tell, but he wasn't one that was going to drag her into his Trouble.

When Rin comes in the door, there's something different in her eyes, in the way she stands. She's looser, happier, more content. "Welcome home." You say.

She smiles and it looks just like her mother. "I'm home."

-/-/-/-

Ten years is taken off your life when you get that phone call. The one from the hospital that said Rin was there. You don't even think about it and sprint out the door, not caring that perhaps you were leaving the door unlocked and perhaps even open and thieves will probably go right in and steal things, but that doesn't matter because you need to get to your girl.

The team is sitting in the waiting room, looking pitiful. Kakashi has his arm in a cast and white bandages are visible through the rips in his shirt. Obito is badly bruised and there are bandages on his cheeks and on his thigh. Minato looks just as haggard as you feel and is arguing quietly with the Hokage in the corner. There's a woman, cheeks tattooed in vaguely tribal designs, talking with a young woman about Rin's age who looks very much like her.

The boys look up when you walk in and stand almost in unison.

"Where is she?" You demand.

The boys look as though they're about to say something, but Minato crosses the room to speak. "They're still working on her."

"What happened?"

The tattooed woman is the one who answers. "She was on a joint mission with my daughter. There was a…complication…and she got hurt."

You don't spare the woman another glance, focusing your anger instead on Minato. "What were you doing? Aren't you supposed to _protect_ her?"

Minato looks pained and even more tired up close. There are dark circles under his eyes and he looks pale. "I was sent on another mission by the Hokage."

Your first instinct is to stomp to the Hokage and tell him that he had no business compromising the safety of your little girl and you very nearly do it, remembering only at the last instant that this man is the leader of the village and it isn't your place.

Before you can finish giving Minato a piece of your mind, there's a sharp clacking of heels across linoleum floors and the eyes of everyone in the waiting room focus on the woman. She's famous, Lady Tsunade. The best healer the village had ever seen and an idol for kunoichi everywhere—or so Rin had told you.

"How is she?" You and Minato ask at the same time.

"She'll be fine." Tsunade assures you. "She's on strict bed rest for the next few days in case of complications, but she'll make a speedy recovery."

"May I see her?" You ask.

Tsunade's hazel eyes eye you carefully. "And you are…?"

"Her father."

"Go ahead."

As soon as she says it, you're running past her into the room she'd come out of. Rin looks very small in that room, and so very fragile. She's stitched and bandaged together and her hair looks too colorful in the starkness of the room.

She isn't awake, but you sit by her until she stirs. Your entire body breathes a sigh of relief at the brown eyes blinking tiredly up at you. "Dad?"

"Hey sweetheart."

"'M in the hospital?"

"Yup. Lady Tsunade took good care of you. She says you'll be out of here in a few days."

Rin smiles and regrets it, wincing as the action pulled at some bandages on her cheek. "Lady Tsunade was here? Really? You think I could talk to her a bit? See if she'll get me an internship at the hospital?"

An internship had to be safer than being out on the field. "I'll ask her."

There was a knock on the doorframe and you turn to look. Her team is standing in the doorway, looking bruised and battered and when Obito lights up to see her and Run laughs when he almost hugs her, but stops at the last instant because he doesn't know exactly how badly she's hurt.

The woman and her daughter are inside the room as well and Rin smiles at them. "Hey, Hana. How're you feeling?"

The daughter, Hana, returns the smile and there's a flash of dainty fangs. "Better than you are right now, I can tell you that." She pauses. "Thank you for that, by the way. I'd be dead right now if it weren't for you. I dunno how to repay you."

"Just teach me that veterinary medicine of yours and we'll call it even."  
Hana nodded. "It's a deal."

-/-/-/-

The day Rin is released from the hospital, you almost want to kill her. There was color in her cheeks. Not the normal, healthy pink kind either. No, there were purple rectangles on her face that began at her jawbone and went halfway up her cheeks.

"What are those?" You ask tightly.

She flinches. "…Tattoos."

"And where did you get them?" Your mother raised you—as you had raised Rin—with the firm belief that you were born as you were meant to be born and you looked as you were supposed to look. Adding ink to your skin was completely against that belief.

"That would be from me."

You look up and it's Hana's mother. You know the Inuzukas by now, know that they run a veterinary clinic and were breeders for tracking dogs for shinobi. You know that she and her husband have been having a few problems, that Hana is a bright girl that plans to follow veterinary medicine.

"What gives you the right to tattoo my daughter without my permission?"

"Frankly, she doesn't need your permission."

"She's only thirteen years old!"

She looks at you oddly. "You're a civilian?"

"Yes."

"In the shinobi world, we come of official age at the chuunin exams. Unofficially, the policy is that if you're willing to fight and die for the village, you can make your own decisions. She agreed to the tattoos."

You look at her and she hunches in on herself a little. "Is that true?" You ask.

"Yes, Dad."

"Why? Do those even mean something?"

"They do." The Inuzuka clan head answers. "Your daughter saved Hana's life. That's something that means a lot to we Inuzukas. She became an honorary member of our clan, entitled to all the rights that any born Inuzuka has."

You know how important a clan is to a shinobi. Neither you or Rin has ever said anything about the fact that they were born civilians, that you ran a bookstore below your apartment for a living instead of defending the village, but you know that she's been at a disadvantage in the eyes of the village. That this woman would make her a member of her clan…it was a big deal.

And suddenly, you can't quite find the anger that you had not two minutes ago. "…Thank you."

The Inuzuka nods before leaving and there's a large dog—or a wolf—waiting just off of hospital grounds. He's grizzled and there's a scar running along the edges of one eye, but when she bends to greet him, one hand scratching at a tattered ear, it looks familiar and home-like.

Rin glances at you. "…Dad? Are you still mad?"

"…No." You ruffle her hair, dry and straw-like after a week of being in the hospital. She'd been taken off bed rest after the second day, as promised, but had had to stay in the hospital just in case. She's as tall as your shoulder now and three's a pang of pain somewhere in your chest. "I just feel like I'm losing my girl."

One of her arms wraps around your waist and your arm settles over her shoulders. "You can be such a sap, Dad." Rin says good-naturedly. "I think it's those romance books you like so much."

"Just because you don't like them…"

"They're really cliché and unrealistic. Honestly, what girl falls into the random guy's arms just like that?"

You're grateful at times like these that she inherited all of her mother's fire and feminism. "So…you don't like Kakashi anymore?"

"We're teammates."  
"That doesn't answer my question."

"It probably wouldn't have worked between us anyway."

There's a hint of a story there, one she hadn't shared with you. "…Really?"

"He doesn't see me like that." Your daughter was a dreamer, yes, but her dreams were touched with realism. They always had been. "Or at all, sometimes."  
"Boys can be stupid." You tell her.

That makes her laugh. "You don't need to tell me. Sometimes, I wonder what the hell is going through their heads and then I think I'm better off not knowing."

"That's my girl." And yes, for right now, she still was.

-/-/-/-

"This mission is going to take a few days." She tells you as she packs.

"Is it dangerous?"

"Not anymore than any other mission recently."

She used to be much more specific with her answers. "And Minato is going with you, right?"

"Yeah, of course." Rin is zipping her pack closed when she looks at you. "Do you remember where I put Kakashi's jounin present?"

"By the couch."

She smiles and kisses your cheek. "Thanks, Dad."

-/-/-/-

As soon as she walks in the door, you know something's wrong. She looks like she would break if you so much as touched her. "Rin?"

When she looks at you, her eyes are red. "…Obito's dead."

You brush a finger over her shoulder, an offer of contact with no expectations. The next moment, you were holding on to a sobbing young woman.

"I couldn't save him, Daddy. I couldn't and it was my fault because they had to come and rescue me and it's all my fault."

"Shh." You rock her gently. Rock and soothe her, like you had years ago when she would run into your room at night, frightened and eyes wide with a nightmare. "Shh."

You can't let her keep thinking like that_ (And maybe it's true. You don't know. But what you do know is that thinking like that will only break her further)_ and that was part of the pain.

You aren't sure how long you stood there, or how long she cried, but she seemed to finally run out of tears even though she still clung to you. When you shift carefully enough to see her face, she's half-asleep, so you pick her up_ (Just like you used to)_ and lay her on her bed, tucking her in like she's six again.

-/-/-/-

She doesn't leave the house for awhile, spending a lot of time sleeping and staring out at nothing. You answer the door with a concerned glance back to her and you didn't expect Trouble to be there.

Except he isn't Trouble anymore because he looks just as broken and badly put back together as Rin does. There's a bandana over his left eye and his mask is still firmly in place. He clears his throat before saying anything.

"…Is Rin home?"

She looks startled to see him. Then again, he's never really come by their apartment often. "Wh-what're you doing here?"

"Figured we could…go for a walk."

A heavy silence stretches taut between them, the terrible memory pressing down on them. Finally Rin nods. "I'll get my shoes."

-/-/-/-

When Rin comes back that night, she looks better than she has since she got back and you grudgingly admit that perhaps Trouble was an okay person.

-/-/-/-

The walks with Kakashi become more frequent and slowly, Rin isn't screaming herself awake in the night anymore and the dark circles are fading from beneath her eyes. She's thrown herself into her training that Tsunade had chosen to give her.

"How is she?" You ask Tsunade one afternoon when you go by the hospital.

"Don't you know?" Tsunade asks. She's pretty, you think. Honey blonde hair pulled back in loose pigtails and a stern tilt to her lips. "You live with her."

"I know how she is as her father. I'm asking for your opinion as a medic."

Tsunade hummed. "An interesting distinction. Well then, as a medic, I can tell you that she'll most likely never heal entirely from this. If she has hallucinations sometimes or hears a voice every now and then, don't be too concerned. That's fairly normal."

"And nightmares?"

She pauses. "How bad?"

"The wake up screaming kind." You've never had a nightmare like that and, after seeing Rin go through it, you never want to.

"That's normal too, especially after something like this. Her mind is trying to deal with the trauma—both from the death and the mental torture."

"Torture?" You ask sharply and she looks at you, surprised.

"Yes, torture. That's why Hatake and Uchiha had to go after her. She'd been captured and tortured for information. These sorts of things, they stay with a person forever. She survived and she'll be stronger for it, but the scars will still be there. There's nothing neither I nor anyone else can do about that."

-/-/-/-

"Dad…what would you say if I told you that me and Kakashi were planning to move in together?"

You look at your daughter across the dinner table. She's a few months short of fifteen and looking closer to her old self. "…Is this hypothetical?"

"No."

"Are you dating?"

"No."

"So then what is it?"

Here, Rin hesitates, setting down her spoon and pushing her bowl of soup away a little. "I don't know what we have, but…I feel…safe, around him, I guess. And…he _gets_ it."

You know what she means by that. Kakashi understood what it was, exactly, that she was going through. You can't even imagine it, even after seeing the aftermath, even after knowing your daughter so well.

"Where?"

Rin swallows. "There's a little apartment out by Eighth Avenue, right on the border of the civilian district. It's not much, but…"

Your first instinct is to say no, that she's not even fifteen yet, that she shouldn't be moving in with the boy who was still Trouble, he was just less Trouble than before. But then you see the tattoos on her cheeks, the shadows in her eyes. You think of how you've seen kids younger than her sitting in some of the bars, shinobi all and they look just as broken and battered as she and Kakashi did sometimes. Shinobi age faster, you know this, but it hasn't really sunk in until now.

So you ask your last question on the matter. "Does he care about you?" And you're not asking that Kakashi love her, or that he make her his wife. He only wants to know if Trouble would watch out for her when you can't.

"Yeah. I think so."

"Then I think I would say…do you need any help moving?"

Rin smiles at you and it isn't quite the same one as before. It's tinged with sadness_ (The scars will still be there)_ and it tears at your heart that this has all happened to your little girl.

-/-/-/-

You notice it, really notice it, at Minato and Kushina's wedding. Rin is a bridesmaid and she's lovely, dressed in sunset hues and a pale orange tiger lily in her hair. Kakashi is best man and he shifts uncomfortably in the suit, but he stays where he is, at Minato's side.

It's at the reception and Rin gets up to get some drinks. When she returns, she has two glasses. One filled with soda and the other with a vanilla milkshake. You're surprised because Rin had inherited your distaste for vanilla ice cream, but it makes more sense when she hands it to Kakashi.

They're allowed to drink alcohol, you know that, but Rin doesn't like the taste and you're not quite sure of Kakashi's reasons.

Minato offers to dance with Rin, who laughs and shakes her head. "Not in these heels, sensei."

They're quiet, mostly. Sitting by the bride and groom's table, naturally, but they don't join in the rest of the celebrations. At some point in the evening, Kakashi lifts the bandana he tied around his eye when not wearing his headband and you see, for the first time, the Sharingan that was so treasured by the Uchiha.

It's red and swirling and more than a little unnerving, although Rin only tenses almost unnoticeably when she sees it. There's a scar, still fairly new, running vertically across the eye. They sit back and watch the dancers, watch the cutting of the cake and the throwing of the bouquet. They talk for some of it, but for the most part, they're simply sitting and enjoying each other's company.

They share a slice of cake, Rin taking the frosting and munching on the sugar-flowers. "We're gonna be eating cake leftovers for a week." She says, seeing how much cake was still left.

"Probably." Kakashi agrees and breaks off a corner of one of the sugar-flowers.

"Think we can convince them that we don't need any more cake?"

"Absolutely not."

Rin sighs. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

-/-/-/-

The day comes when the hospital calls once more and you're once again rushing to the hospital. Tsunade is already out there, speaking to Minato. Kushina is the one who looks up at you and points silently to a room.

You rush inside and blink several times because you don't want to see what you're not seeing. You're not seeing dark red hair splayed out on a pillow and brown eyes. Instead, the hair is silver and the eyes are mismatched and the sheets are pulled up to hide everything from the nose down.

"What happened?"

Kakashi looks up at you and you don't see a person, who you know for a fact, has killed people, has lied and stolen. You don't see Trouble. You see a teenager and a fragile one at that. "I'm sorry." His voice cracks halfway between the sorry. "She's gone."

The words are dim and echoing in your ears. "What?"

He looks like he's about to fall apart and not in the way that boys fall apart, all sharp splinters and sharper tempers. No, this is a real, vase-crashing-onto-the-floor shattering kind of fall apart. "I-I couldn't save her. I broke my promise. She's gone."

-/-/-/-

There's almost nothing of your daughter's team left. The Uchiha-who-didn't-act-like-an-Uchiha wasn't there anymore, grinning wide and introducing himself proudly. The sensei wasn't there to be polite and a mediator between the boys.

The worst part is that your girl isn't there. She's not there to smile her unsure-but-game smile, not there to laugh or relate stories to you. To eat a half ham-and-pineapple pizza with or to help you stock new books into the shop downstairs. She's gone and you don't think it's anywhere where you can find her.

The only part left is the ghost boy, the one who's all scars and red and silver and apologies. The one who doesn't look you in the eye when he sees you; the one who you'll find standing in front of the memorial stone sometimes, looking morose and pitiful and rather like a drowned cat left in an alley.

And now more than ever, you're wishing that Rin had never met the team.

-/-/-/-

_At the temple, there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read Loss, only feel it.—Memoirs of a Geisha_


End file.
